Since January 2025, the Trump administration has removed more than 25,000 people to third countries, nations that are not their homeland, a sweeping policy now facing a fresh federal court ruling that calls it illegal.
A six-month investigation by a consortium of 26 international media outlets, led by Forbidden Stories and FRANCE 24, puts hard numbers on the scale of the effort for the first time. By August 31, 2026, at least 5,447 people of 89 different nationalities had been flown to 28 countries on six continents. Another 20,000 non-Mexican nationals were pushed into Mexico by land. The administration has struck deportation agreements with 35 countries total, and shows no sign of slowing down, even after a federal appeals court ruled on September 18 that the policy, as applied, violates the law.
The Department of Homeland Security framed the program in stark terms. In a June 2025 statement, the agency said it targets what it called "aliens who are so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won't take them back, including convicted murderers, child rapists and drug traffickers." But lawyers representing dozens of deportees say the reality on the ground looks nothing like that description.
The Trump administration's first-term deportation agreements were limited to Mexico and three Central American nations, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The current policy goes far beyond that footprint. Savi Arvey, director of refugee and immigrant rights policy at Human Rights First, described the expansion:
"Now we're seeing that the US is going well beyond Mexico and Central America to countries in the Caribbean, countries throughout South America and countries across Africa and even in parts of Eastern Europe."
Guatemala remains the second-largest flight destination, receiving nearly 3,000 deportees, 90 percent of them Mexican nationals. Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, and El Salvador each took more than 250 people who were not citizens of those countries. More than 250 men sit in an El Salvador high-security prison, where Human Rights Watch has documented what it calls "inhumane prison conditions," "constant beatings," and "cases of sexual violence."
Africa stands out. Thirteen African nations, more than a third of all countries that signed deals, agreed to accept deportees. Twelve of those 13 had already received people by the end of August 2026. Ghana alone took in more than 100. Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and Eswatini each received dozens.
Arvey did not hold back about the kind of governments Washington is now partnering with, pointing to "countries that previously the United States did not look to partner with," including "such a corrupt autocratic government like Equatorial Guinea." Her assessment of the administration's calculus was blunt:
"It seems like the goal for the United States is the deal. The profile of the country, its human rights record doesn't matter at all."
The broader immigration enforcement push has already produced measurable demographic shifts. Census data shows the foreign-born U.S. population has dropped by 2.9 million since Trump took office, a figure that reflects both deportations and voluntary departures.
Rabbiatu Kuyateh, a nurse born in Sierra Leone, fled her country's civil war in the 1990s and built a life in the United States over more than 30 years. She paid taxes. She worked. She had no criminal record, by her own account.
In early July 2025, Kuyateh showed up for a routine ICE appointment in Baltimore, Maryland. She was detained on the spot. Four months later, still locked up, she learned she would be deported, not to Sierra Leone, but to Ghana, a country more than 1,000 kilometers away that she had never set foot in.
"Ghana? I'm not from Ghana; what am I going to do there? I only saw Ghana on the map; I don't know where that is."
Kuyateh insisted she had done nothing wrong:
"I did not commit any crime; I always abided by the law."
Her case is not an outlier. Alma David, an American lawyer representing dozens of deportees sent to Africa, says most of the people she represents have no criminal record at all. That claim directly contradicts DHS's stated justification, that the policy is aimed at the most dangerous offenders whose home countries refuse to take them back.
The administration has also been deporting Haitians admitted under the Biden-era Temporary Protected Status program, part of a wider effort to unwind protections that immigration hawks long viewed as open-ended loopholes.
One of the sharpest criticisms in the investigation centers on deportees who held formal legal protections, specifically "withholding of removal" or protection under the Convention Against Torture. Historically, those designations meant the U.S. government could not send someone back to a country where they faced persecution or torture. The Trump administration found a workaround: send them to a different country instead.
Arvey called the practice "extremely worrying," noting the targeting of "people who've been granted withholding and removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture for third-country removals, in particular to various countries in Africa, but also to Mexico."
Soraya, not her real name, is a Ghanaian woman who fled to the United States in 2024 because of her sexual orientation. She held withholding of removal status. The government deported her to Cameroon.
"Withholding of removal, it's protection. I was thinking they were going to protect me rather than sending me to a third country that will not accept me. But they still brought me to Cameroon, an African country that doesn't accept LGBT."
Malick, a Senegalese man who came to the United States in 2023 after fleeing safety threats, held a U.S. work permit and also had withholding of removal status. He was put on the same deportation flight as Kuyateh.
"I had started a new life in the United States. I felt safe."
Federal courts have been chipping away at TPS protections in parallel. A federal judge recently cleared the path for deportation of Somali TPS holders after a Supreme Court ruling, and separate rulings have ended Burma TPS protections, leaving only two countries still shielded.
Michael Garcia Bocheneck, interim director of Human Rights Watch's U.S. program, offered a pointed assessment of the administration's strategy:
"We think the government is using third-country removals to avoid the responsibilities that it has under international law not to return people to harm. In many cases, it seems that the tacit assumption is that the third country will simply return them to their home country anyway. It's an indirect form of return to harm, and it's still a violation of international law."
That fear is not hypothetical. Isatou, not her real name, is a Guinean woman who migrated to the United States to escape a forced marriage. The government removed her to Ghana. From Ghana, she was sent back to Guinea, the very country she had fled. She is now in hiding.
"I don't go out anymore, I'm scared of coming across my family. They ruined my life."
Carolyn Patty Blum, a clinical professor of law emerita at UC Berkeley, described the legal principle at stake, non-refoulement, a rule that bars governments from sending anyone to a place where they face persecution, human rights violations, or torture. Blum called it "a defining principle" of international law and said flatly: "Both the United States and the receiving countries violate that law by transferring people to places where they face serious risk of harm." She added that the administration's stated "assurances" from receiving countries are "inadequate" and lack "any methods of ongoing oversight" once someone leaves U.S. soil.
Meredyth Yoon, a lawyer representing more than a dozen people removed to African countries, put it more simply: "In many cases, what we have seen is they are very much sending people back to countries that US immigration judges have established are dangerous for them."
On September 18, 2026, a federal appeals court ruled that removing people to third countries without giving them a meaningful chance to raise fears of torture or persecution is illegal. The court rejected the Trump administration's argument that general human rights assurances from receiving countries are enough.
Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, the group that brought the class-action case, said the ruling takes effect immediately:
"The decision is effective now, which means DHS cannot continue to apply its existing third-country removal policy."
But she also predicted the fight is far from over, saying she expects "the government will seek Supreme Court review and could seek a stay of the decision while they do so."
DHS General Counsel James Percival wasted no time signaling the administration's posture. Shortly after the ruling, he said the third-country deportation policy will continue. His reasoning: "If you claim fear in your home country, DHS has the right to send you elsewhere."
That framing sidesteps the court's central holding, that deportees must have a real opportunity to argue they face danger in the third country, not just in their homeland. Whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, and how quickly, will determine whether the policy survives in its current form.
Arvey noted that the administration has grown less transparent over time. Early on, officials were "really overt about the fact they're carrying out these flights." Over the past year, she said, "the government has been very opaque about these third-country transfers." Agreements with receiving countries are often described as secretive, and deportees in many cases receive little to no notice before removal, leaving them no real chance to contest it.
The scale of the enforcement machine is hard to dispute. The administration has moved tens of thousands of people across borders in under two years. Cases like that of a twice-deported illegal immigrant who killed a U.S. Marine and re-entered under Biden illustrate why many Americans support aggressive removal. The question the courts are now forcing is not whether the government can deport, but whether it can send people to countries they have no connection to, with no chance to object, and call it lawful.
A government that insists it is targeting the worst of the worst ought to welcome the chance to prove it. Refusing even to let deportees raise a fear-of-harm claim before shipping them to a stranger's country suggests the policy's real purpose is speed and volume, not justice.
